What I did with Dead Cat.
Have you ever had those situations you didn’t know what to do by virtue of the fact that you’ve never had to deal with that before? I tend to have a lot of these situations in my life and its unfortunate. In the summer of 2001 at the front of our church property one Monday laid a gray cat, clearly dead and clearly rolled over by a car. Evidently the driver of the car emerged from his or her vehicle and lovingly placed the cat off the road onto our property.
I asked my boss at the time what we should do with the body of dead cat, and he told me to let it stay there until Sunday (6 days away) or until the owner of dead cat came to save the lifeless feline from being eaten by the birds of Fellowship Church.
That week happened to be 1)the week of VBS and 2)the hottest week of the summer, so all the kids who happened upon our campus complained about our lack of air conditioning in the buildings and that nasty smell emanating from dead cat.
Saturday rolled around along with another successful week of kids craziness and once again I asked my boss what I should do, to which he replied that I should “get rid” of dead cat and he should not be there the next morning. “How should I get rid of him?” I asked, not familiar with the politics of ‘getting rid’ of koffin kitties, having rarely spent any time with pets as a child. “I don’t care, just make it gone,” was his response, clearly feeling the same way I felt about dead cat.
So I walked to the back of our church and grabbed a heavy duty construction trash bag. Then I walked slowly toward dead cat as if somehow it would jump up and attack me. Oh yeah, I forgot the shovel. I had a shovel in my other hand.
Dead cat was nothing, if it wasn’t heavy. I got the shovel deep underneath the cat, and heaved it above the ground. Then I had that awkward bag shuffle we sometimes do when we have something to place in a trash bag, but we don’t have two hands left to open the trash bag wide enough. Do you know the awkward bag shuffle? It frustrates me. I have the awkward bag shuffle often now as I place Bruno’s (the dog Carie and I are currently dog sitting) dung in a plastic bag when he goes on Neighbor Michael’s lawn. Just kidding. He hasn’t gone on Neighbor Michael’s lawn…yet.
So after about 10 minutes of trying to fit dead cat into a bag, I then walked over the the dumpster and threw dead cat away, not realizing the impact this would have on dead cat’s human mother.
As you probably could have guessed (though in some world inside of my head I did not), dead cat’s human mother eventually came to me, showed me a picture, and asked if I had seen her cat. Immediately I knew what had happened to her cat, and I inferred to her that I knew. In shock, she brushed my words off as if it probably wasn’t her cat I had done that too. I half-heartedly and like a politician agreed, saying that the possibility existed it was someone else’s cat, and that I could not be certain, but inside I thought to myself, I’m sorry maam, I threw your cat away about a week and a half ago. If I was raised with animal common sense I would not have, but I don’t have any of that.
If it ever happens again though, I’ll be sure to give the deceased animal a funeral.
